


disc skipping; please take out and clean

by crowry



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-07
Updated: 2011-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-25 19:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowry/pseuds/crowry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve reached a stalemate at the edge of the universe. Spoilers for EoA5. Very lightly John/Karkat and Dave/Terezi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	disc skipping; please take out and clean

**DISC SKIPPING, PLEASE TAKE OUT AND CLEAN.**   
_You’ve reached a stalemate at the edge of the universe._

  
It turns out to be underwhelming, in the end, filed mentally behind Sollux and the blue blood on Terezi’s dragon cane; behind the chalky white of Gamzee’s fucking minstrel makeup on your fingers and the soft white glow of Kanaya’s skin, battling for dominance with the harsh throw of The Green Sun.

But yeah, behind all that, there’s John and Jade showing up with the entirety of their Incipisphere, both god tiered and useful and bright eyed. Most importantly, they’re alive, and while you wait for something to happen—you have no idea what anymore—you find yourself staring at Egbert blankly for minutes before your remember that he is now occupying the same space as you, three dimensionally. He’s no longer a strange alien boy on a computer screen.

He catches you staring and comes to sit down on the warm metal floor next to you, Jade trailing after him.

The funny thing about you is, it’s easy to yell and be angry when you think things are relatively under your control, but now you have no idea what’s going on. Everything is out of your control. All illusion of control has been shattered, as if the illusion was a finely crafted green timepiece and it’s had the misfortune of encountering a certain exile.

Bad jokes aside, you don’t feel much like yelling. You feel like pulling your shirt over your head and not coming out until you’re just some lameass mutant fuckwad in your hive, battling your lusus for access to the food storage unit in your cuisineblock. (It doesn’t work like that. You fucking know this, you have always fucking known this. If there was one thing you ever knew it was that life was not fair and life goes in one direction for you: badly.) You hunch over your skinny kid knees and look at your shoes and hate yourself for ever thinking you could handle being the leader. What a joke.

For once in his life, John is quiet. Jade is, too, both of them settling on either side of you. Terezi is behind you with the bloody husk of Sollux’s body at her feet. You have a smear of his blood on your shirt from where she pushed you away for trying to hold her.

“Karkat,” Jade says, frowning. “I’m really sorry.”

“What,” you say, “That’s stupid, why the fuck would you be sorry?” you say. She just purses her lips and reaches for your hand. You overreact, pulling out of her reach, and accidentally hit Egbert in the chest.

He doesn’t laugh stupidly at that like you expect him to, just looks at you and then back at the big gold ship they rode in on.

It’s not a really good moment, but you remember it.

*

Later, Lalonde and the coolkid arrive, and Aradia and Sollux and you’re not sure what to make of any of this anymore, because Dead Daves were the enemy and now you’ve got a dead Sollux and a ghost Sollux and you killed your sister. You’re not sure what’s good heads or bad heads, only the bright sour apple of The Green Sun and how that’s starting to make you feel sick. Maybe it’s always made you feel sick. Maybe maybe is a stupid word and you shouldn’t think about it.

Dave doesn’t talk to you at first; he can’t seem to get over seeing his human friends. He allows himself to be pulled into John’s hugs and occasionally will catch his fingertips with his ectosister’s and swing their arms between them. You don’t really remember your dream self dying, but you think it’s probably something that bonds you to a person.

Aradia gives you and your cane a look and you can feel the raspberry tone of silent approval, barely masking the stench of her hate. You don’t hate her but you don’t like her right now, either. You hate yourself a little for what you’ve done. Sollux doesn’t interact with anyone but you can feel him there, a blurry two-tone ghost at the periphery of your senses.

When Dave finally grows the glands to come and talk to you, you don’t know what to say, and you can smell that he doesn’t either. He sits next to you on your silly pile of dragon cape and does a whole lot of nothing, red hood pulled down and unleashing a static-y mass of white-blonde hair floating around his head like a halo. You regret the loss of the screen between you, because it’s not like you couldn’t ask to lick him, but you’re not really in the mood.

You both sit there and say nothing, no silly apologies and no dumb coolkid bluffs or feelings, and then he starts to fidget with his sylladex. You’re a breath away from warning him that if even if the shit he dumps all over you both is R34LLY COOL you’re still going to kick his butt into The Green Sun when he manages to eject something that smells like red and burnt and irony, but mostly of Dave.

He leans away from you, and there’s a bright flash.

“Ow, Dave!” you say, and he snorts the tiniest and coolest of snorts before handing you a piece of paper.

You look at it and back at him and he says, “Go on, give that baby a taste.”

“Dave,” you say, taking a whiff of the print. “Why the jegus fuck would you make this?”

He tenses up beside you and starts shitting around with his sylladex again—you can hear him counting like a not-very-cool-kid. You tentatively taste the comic.

“Fuck you,” you say, “Dave this is awful!”

*

She throws it at you.

Ok well, she crumples it up first, and then she throws it at you, and then she stomps a few feet away, like inches short of running into a cold grey wall. She crouches down and plays with the folded edge of her cosplay boots.

You can hear her sniffling her weird teal troll snot and making these little breathy noises. You’re not sure if she’s laughing or crying, and you feel like a shitty person and also maybe a failure because you can’t tell.

You figure you’ve had worse ideas, but wow, that did not have the effect you’d hoped for. You uncrumple the comic and look at it.

Wow, you think. Ok. You kind of deserve this. It’s the most depressing Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff comic ever. You don’t even want to think about it. You crumple it up and captchalogue it as Proof I’m An Idiot (3+1+1+1+4+1+3+1+1+1+2+1+1+1 = 22÷10 = 11), only fuck, that doesn’t work. It’s ejected halfway across the room and into a corner. You make a mental note to burn it later.

*

You don’t know why, but when Karkat wanders back to his respiteblock, you and Jade both follow him. He’s been leading you near-silently through the station, eyes glassing over when you pass the lab, full of colorful stains and burnt holes.

He seems weary of everything now; he can’t even work up a good yell. Somehow you think that even if he did, you’d just feel bad for him, or feel bad about what he was saying. Jade would probably be angry back at him, because Jade is ready to face things now and she has nothing to face.

You’ve known Jade for a very long time, so you know this is probably really upsetting her.

More than that you know that you’re starting to get pretty upset, too. It’s like you’re Dave Strider and this whole station is a box of puppets—you are one rump from doing an acrobatic pirouette off the fucking handle. Except you weren’t privy to that conversation, so it’s more like you’re sure someone should have mentioned Vriska to you by now.

You’re so sure, in fact, that you’re afraid to ask.

She’ll turn up later.

You’re not sure how long it takes, after all, to come back to life from a god tier death! It could be hours.

Days, even. You’re just not going to think too hard about it. Vriska will make fun of you if you fret too much about it.

Karkat isn’t a really hospitable host, but he’s got a pile of ~ath manuals that he gestures to when you and Jade shuffle in after him. He’s muttering something about indecency.

He looks really tired, you think.

It’s weird to finally see the face behind the words, to think in terms of Alive and Breathing, depth and width and volume and warmth instead of the Angry Grey Text. Karkat is thatches of black hair around rounded orange horns, wide eyes and a too-big sweater that makes him look tinier instead of bigger. He comes up to your nose, but he always stands far enough away that you’re not looking down at him.

You don’t think too hard about that, either.


End file.
